musicals
Matt Wolf
The work isn't finished on Big, if this stage musical of the beloved 1988 Tom Hanks film is ever to, um, make it big. A Broadway flop in 1996 where it was among the last shows directed by the late, much-admired Englishman Mike Ockrent, the material finds a sweetness in its West End incarnation that eluded it Stateside. But even with onetime boyband member Jay McGuiness adroitly capturing the manchild played by Hanks onscreen, the show remains awkwardly positioned between the satiric and the sentimental. And a ruthless pruning wouldn't go amiss either: by the time we'd got to the long-aborning Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Renée Zellweger already has strong musical cinema form, Her role as Roxie Hart in Chicago garnered her second Oscar nomination. However, playing and singing Judy Garland is a whole different ball game. The film Judy takes a late-Sixties run of London dates as the prism through which to view the Hollywood star at the end of her life, focusing on both the triumphs and the damage wrought by her celebrity rollercoaster career. The soundtrack, on the other hand, doesn't often intimate those highs and lows so much as capture her hyper-jolly, go-get-‘em film persona.Zellweger inhabits the vocal role Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Where does music come from? That’s the vital question posed to Sergei Rachmaninoff in Dave Malloy’s extraordinary 2015 chamber work, as the great late-Romantic Russian composer – stuck in his third year of harrowing writer’s block – tries to relocate his gift. It comes from others and from himself; from past and present; from everything and nothing. It is ephemeral, and yet it is at the core of his very being.Rach (Keith Ramsay, pictured below with Tom Noyes), traumatised by the failure of his first symphony in 1897 – mangled by a drunken conductor and finished off by a sharp-tongued Read more ...
Marianka Swain
William Finn and James Lapine’s musical – which combines two linked one-acts, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, set in late 1970s/early 1980s New York – picked up Tony Awards in 1992 for its book and score, and was nominated again in 2016 for an acclaimed revival. Yet the UK hasn’t sighted this landmark piece until now, with Tara Overfield-Wilkinson directing and choreographing an engaging if somewhat chaotic production.Daniel Boys plays Marvin, who recently left wife Trina (Laura Pitt-Pulford) for lover Whizzer (Oliver Savile, pictured below) – while maintaining close ties for Read more ...
Marianka Swain
As British summer really kicks in (umbrellas at the ready), our thoughts might turn fondly to the sunny Caribbean. Good timing, then, for the return of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical set in the French Antilles. Based on Rosa Guy’s novel, it tells a familiar tale of boundary-crossing lovers – The Little Mermaid meets Romeo and Juliet – though with some location-specific details that give it fresh interest.One stormy night, villagers distract a crying child with the story of Ti Moune (Chrissie Bhima, pictured below with Martin Cush), a dark-skinned peasant girl who falls Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wisecracks can be profound. The late André Previn – who spent most of the period from his late teens to his mid-thirties working in film studios – once responded to a critic’s snub that the music of Korngold all sounded like Hollywood with the line: “No, Hollywood music all sounds like Korngold.”Last night’s Prom was under the title “The Warner Brothers Story” and its highlights came in works by the two European émigrés Korngold and Max Steiner. The programme showed quite how far-reaching the consequences were of Warner Brothers’ decision in the early 1930s, and at the beginning of the era of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Following a triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ Superstar, now playing at the Barbican, the Park works its magic on another of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Seventies rock operas. Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down, super-sleek, contemporary take excavates the biting satire of a work sometimes bogged down in period trappings and melodrama, and locates the furious spirit of Eva Perón – portrayed, with unusually convincing youth and fire, by the electrifying American actress Samantha Pauly.Pauly, who starred in the Chicago production of Six, makes a memorable UK debut as the wife of the Read more ...
bella.todd
A great hunk of rotting meat hangs centre stage, suspended over a rusty wheelbarrow. A figure in a bloody butcher’s apron picks through the stalls, searching for cans of ‘xxxtra cheap lager’. From the direction of the band, sinister Wurlitzer sounds begin to stir the air. If the words "family musical" fill you with certain wholesome expectations, you are likely to have them gleefully subverted by the National’s new summer show. A musical staging of a cult children’s book, Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear features Gary Wilmot in a flying fat suit singing about snacks, a demented sea captain with a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s too darn hot, BoJo is in Downing Street, and we’re all going to Brexit hell – so we might as well sing the blues. Or at least take a night off from the apocalypse to enjoy a virtuoso company singing them for us in this rousing revival of Sheldon Epps’ 1980 musical revue, which showcases jazz greats like Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. It’s also unfinished business for Susie McKenna, who directed a short run at Hackney Empire back in 2014.Sharon D Clarke once again plays The Lady, whose concise narration sets the scene. We’re in a rundown hotel Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If good intentions were all, The View UpStairs would be Gypsy. As it is, the European premiere of this 2017 Off Broadway musical set in a New Orleans gay bar firebombed by arson in 1973 serves both as an important reminder of a grievous event in LGBTQ history and as an object lesson in the difficulty of writing a persuasive show. At two interval-less hours, the musical at the Soho Theatre takes a long time to get to its inevitably calamitous ending and depends no end on possibly the most name-heavy ensemble (especially for musicals buffs) ever gathered at this address: the cast's commitment Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Robert James Waller’s bestselling, though critically panned, 1992 romance novel was reincarnated in the Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep-starring film, and then again in Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman’s Tony-winning 2013 musical – both adaptations wisely sloughing off some of the original’s schmaltz and sappiness. Now Trevor Nunn, whose Menier-originated Fiddler on the Roof is currently playing in the West End, helms the moderately successful UK premiere.Italian war bride Francesca (Jenna Russell) has been transplanted to Middle America, where she’s raised two children with farmer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Cheeky and broad and (for the most part) as entertaining as seems humanly possible, this embryonic entry from the collaborative pen of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber is back at its onetime London home, the Palladium. It's a production far surpassing any of the various London and Broadway Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoats I have come across over the last 30 years or more. For that, credit a director, Laurence Connor, busy riding the buoyancy he generated in a contemporary Lloyd Webber entry, School of Rock, alongside the canny pairing of a name star in a livewire Sheridan Read more ...